Give Yourself Grace

I am very impatient. I struggle with processes. I want things done yesterday. I have very little tolerance for waiting for something to be completed when it is in my power to complete it. When I have moved from one house to another, I stayed up late, got up early, and did not stop working until boxes were unpacked, broken down, and thrown away. I like things to be settled. I like things to be neat, tidy, and completed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I’m being refined day by day, but patience in imperfection is a toilsome struggle for me.

You too?

Faith and deep growth don’t work that way. We are accepted by God and called His children apart from our own efforts, good works, and best intentions. But He loves us too much to leave us unchanged. He is the Master Gardner that prunes, cuts back dead and dying (and sometimes healthy) branches of our lives so that we can grow into healthy, complete Christ followers. That process takes our entire lives. I’m grateful that He never gives up on us. He promises to finish what He started. He’s in it for the long-game with us.

Becoming a parent has so greatly affected my perception of God and myself. Parenthood is an amazing earthly shadow of what God’s love for us really is like. It is beautiful to me that my son acts like a little boy, but it’s essential that over time he grows into a man. He’s still new to this life, and it is my job to teach and train him to be a mature, responsible adult. This is a LONG process with a lot of repetition, a lot of discipline, and a lot of humor required. While he is not perfect, or grown up yet, he is 100% my son. He has access to me, my home, where I am. I provide for him. I love him unconditionally.

We are, in the same way, fully accepted into the Lord’s home as His children once we have authentically placed our faith in Christ. But as a perfect Father, He teaches us, He disciplines us when necessary, He loves us, and ultimately He changes us to be like Him. He reaches deep into the pit of our heart and starts to root out weeds that choke out His spirit from within us so that our work may be increasingly fruitful and abundant, and our hearts and lives more and more healed and set free.

Miles J. Stanford has a fantastic book about Spiritual growth called The Green Letters. In it, Stanford states that, “many [believers] feel they are not making progress unless they are swiftly and constantly forging ahead.” He goes on to quote A.H. Strong: “When God wants to make an oak, He takes an hundred years, but when He wants to make a squash, He takes six months.” Growth and progress take time.

We are wonderful works in progress. What a liberating opportunity to be set free from our expectations of immediate perfection in ourselves and in others. God is working, shaping, deepening, strengthening, pruning, and creating healthy, fruitful followers. Give yourself the grace to be where you are, and allow the Lord to have His way with shaping you more and more over time.